Pulse broadening factor as a criterion to assess nonlinear penalty of 40-Gbit/s RZ-DQPSK signals in dynamic transparent optical networks

The real-time scheduling and routing in dynamic transparent optical networks requires fast and accurate evaluation of transmission penalty caused by nonlinear kerr effects with different dispersion maps. However, the conventional method using nonlinear phase shift can only be applied to assess the nonlinear penalty with optimized dispersion maps. In this paper, we introduce pulse broadening factor into the approach and propose a novel method to accurately evaluate nonlinear penalty and numerically investigate the feasibility of our novel method in 40-Gb/s Return-to-Zero Differential Quadrature Phase-Shift Keying (RZ-DQPSK) systems. Simulation results show that our approach can achieve good evaluation performance even with non-optimized dispersion maps.